Now one company has decided to embrace that image – it has named its product “Mother.”

The device, from a firm called Sen.se, caught my eye at a press preview for the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in part because of its unique design. It looks like a cross between WALL-E’s girlfriend EVE and Russian nesting dolls. Mother has slightly creepy glowing eyes – but surely has your best interest at heart?

Mother’s potential use is intriguing: Each Mother unit talks wirelessly to a set of smaller tracking devices, dubbed cookies, that can sense motion and temperature. You can put cookies on things and people – on your body to gather data about how much you walk, on your coffee machine to track many espressos you drink, on your front door to track whenever it is opened, on your toothbrush to see how often and how long you brush … and so forth.

Whenever the cookies get close to the Mother unit, they wirelessly send back their data to the Internet.

The company says users of Mother, which is supposed to start shipping in the spring, will be able look at all their info at once, or drill down on certain topics. And if something is really important, you can have an alert sent to your phone when a sensor detects a change.

So what does all that data do for you? That’s a question that bedevils many Internet of Things gadgets on display here at CES. Mother’s makers say the data she tracks can help you gain peace of mind by answering specific questions in your life, such as, “Am I drinking enough water?” or, “Did somebody open my secret drawer?”

Lots of companies want to connect parts of your body, home and life to the Internet – a trend called the “Internet of Things.” Mother’s maker, Rafi Haladjian, told me he thinks having separate devices for all these things is too expensive, and too cumbersome because they can’t talk to each other. “There are not so many needs that are worth $200” for a distinct Internet-connected device, he said.

Mother, which costs $222 for a base unit and four cookies, is designed to be repurposed as new challenges or needs spring to mind, he said. It’s kind of like a mobile device that can run an ever-changing array of apps.

Where did the name come from? “We need a device that does all sort of things,” Haladjian said. “The metaphor that matched this noble caring figure is the mother. She is not a nurse, a gardener or a cop – she is everything at the same time.”